Product Description

The board is randomly set up. Players place their pawns on the board and try to connect the cities. Spaces start with terrain blocks and players take one when they land on a given space. These blocks are then spent to connect tiles on the board.

When cities are connected by a player, they mark both cities with dwelling markers. The game ends when all dwellings are placed or there are no terrain blocks left on the board. Players score for dwelling markers -- highest score wins.

Product Reviews

I played Morisi at Essen and I really enjoyed the game. No luck element, short playing time (no more than 45 minutes) and a good replay value due to the 'Catan-style' board. I do not rate it five stars because there is maybe not enough player interaction. But if you like this kind of little entertaining game that plays well at 2, 3 or 4 players, you will appreciate this one.

Morisi plays even better (smoother) than Isi, even with two players. Basically the rules are the same. The biggest change is the terrain: hexagons instead of squares. There are more ways to build your roads (two or more roads along the way are allowed at extra costs), so you make a long term planning. And now you can play this wonderful game with more players too. Don't miss this one.

At a glance, Morisi looks like a simplified, abstract version of Settlers of Catan. There is a variable board of hexagons of six different colors, the colors representing five kinds of countryside plus cities. Unlike Settlers, the overall configuration of the land does not have to be a hexagon. Players' pawns race around the board acquiring knowledge of the land, represented by colored wooden cubes placed on the hexes during setup. With that knowledge the players build trade routes between cities, and in doing so earn houses within the cities. The trade routes are little wooden sticks similar to the road pieces in Settlers, though in Morisi the routes go through the centers of hexes, not on the edges. It is with the houses that the winner is determined at the end of the game.

The game play is an interesting mix of racing and building. It also has a puzzle-like aspect to it: you must plan out your pawn's career so as to get the appropriately-colored cubes for your routes more efficiently than your opponents. It is in one's best interest to act quickly, because the person who lays his trade routes down first has an advantage--in the 3- and 4-player game, it is more expensive to lay down parallel trade routes, and in the 2-player game it is forbidden.

The variable board is a good feature, though it can be a drawback too. It is certainly possible for all the cities to end up clumped together in a corner. It can also happen that routes through one particular land type will be in such demand that the game will end prematurely (once all cubes of one color have been looted, the game is over). Of course, one can edit the starting setup by switching a few hexes so that there is a more even distribution.

Morisi is attractive to look at, moves quickly, and is fairly engaging. I like the game, but I must say that if one were feeling uncharitable, there are some things about it that might draw complaints.

-- Trade routes will spread over each other and crisscross, so there is no real pleasure of having 'territory.' By the end of the game the board is usually a homogenous mess.

-- Beating your opponents to a useful bit of real estate or just generally getting in their way is the extent of player interaction.

-- The scoring system is relatively involved for an abstract game. This situation is made worse by a clumsy translation into English. I am tempted to write a translation of the English translation.

-- Once everyone is up to speed on the strategy (see the Counter review), ties are not rare.

It also must be mentioned that while workable, the 2-player game is a little unsatisfying. After a few plays it loses its charm. The game really needs 3 or 4 players.

Overall, however, if you are intrigued by the concept and the presentation, Morisi is worth getting.

Morisi has nine cities, and five colors of terrain initially filled with blocks of matching color. Choose your pawn's starting space wisely. It moves to an adjacent vacant space each turn, earning you a block, which is then removed from the board. Removing the last block of a color ends the game. You can spend blocks to place sticks in your color, starting either in cities or at other sticks, and ending in adjacent terrain of the block's color. Connect cities with lines of sticks to form trade routes, which score points at the end; cities with the most routes are rewarded handsomely. "More" is never enough in this gentle but immensely challenging game.

It is inevitable that games from big companies attract more attention
than games from little ones. We might like to kid ourselves that merit
is the sole factor in determining what we buy and play, but we are wrong.
Marketing, distribution and the lure of pretty bits all have a major effect
on sales figures and consequently on deciding which games get the most
attention. It is then from among the games that have been getting the most
attention that the prize winners will emerge. This makes Cwali's
achievements in the Gamers' Choice awards all the more impressive. Last
year their 2-player game Isi made the nominations list in the 2-player
section and this year its multi-player follow-up, Morisi, did the same
in the main one.

Morisi is a network building game played on a board which the players
create at the start by pushing together a collection of "Siedler-type"
hexagons into whatever shape they fancy. Nine of these hexagons are
grey and represent cities; the other thirty (6 in each of 5 colours)
are to be thought of as various types of countryside. The "land" is
built with the hexagons face down and the only rule is that by the time
it is finished, each hexagon must have at least three of its sides in
contact with other hexagons. Experience suggests that slightly elongated
shapes play better than those that are too round and also that having one
or two "holes" in the interior adds to the interest. When the land is
complete, the tiles are turned face up and at that point it is often a good
idea to do a little "editing" so as to get the cities reasonably evenly
distributed.

The aim is to build "trade routes" between as many pairs of cities as you
can and for this purpose each player has a collection of sticks. Placing a
stick through the adjacent sides of a pair of hexagons creates a section
of road between the two. A trade route is then a chain of such links stretching
from one city to another. When a player succeeds in building a trade route,
they place a house in each of the two cities. (Claims that Corné did not
use his Siedler set when creating this game will not be entertained, but
it is pleasing to see that he found a good use for it. More than I ever did.)
These houses will form the basis for the scoring at the end.

Building roads costs "money" in the form of wooden blocks, which players
move round the board collecting. They come in the same five colours as the
countryside hexagons and at the start of the game each such hexagon will
contain between 1 and 3 blocks in its own colour.

On your turn you begin by moving your playing piece to an adjacent hexagon
(unless there is someone else already there, in which case you skip over them
to the hexagon beyond). If there is one or more blocks on the tile you have
moved to, you take one and add it to your store. You then have the option
of creating a trade route. This, as stated before, is a chain of sticks
and it must do one of three things:

connect 2 cities to each other;

connect a city to one of your existing trade routes;

connect two of your existing trade routes.

The result will be that you then place new houses.

The basic cost of placing a stick is one cube of the colour you are
building into, but this is increased if someone else has already place a
stick across the hex side.

The game ends when either all the blocks of one colour have been removed
from the board or when one player has placed all their houses. You then
score one point for each house you have in the three most populous cities
plus four points for each city where you have at least one house. So the
twin aims are to have as many cities as you can in your network and to be
big in the cities which end up as the most important.

The game, as you can imagine, involves a lot of racing about as you try to
collect the blocks you need to build in key positions before your rivals
do. Doing a lot of building in the same area as another player is not a
good idea because of the extra building costs -- unless, of course, you
get there first, in which case it is a tremendous one. The best general
approach seems to be to establish a "hub" in open countryside near
several cities and then to connect them all through it. This delivers
the best ratio of number of routes established to number of blocks spent.
(You can't use the cities themselves as hubs, because routes only score if
they are direct. At least, that is my reading of the rules.)

The game is very simple to learn, gives everyone plenty to think about
(or if you prefer worrying to thinking, you can do that instead) and speeds
along to a conclusion in a time that is perfect for its content. The
game components -- standard German wooden bits plus sturdy and nicely
illustrated hexagons -- are to the same high standard as the game design
itself. The rule book is in but not native speaker English and this will
cause you a few double takes where the writer's ambition exceeds his reach,
but there is nothing you can't cope with and the game comes with a sheet
of clearly illustrated examples to help you. This is a first class game
and package. Recommended.

In October a new Cwali game will be released. The name of the game is Morisi, which is the 2, 3 and 4 player version of the 2-player game Isi (sold last year).
In Morisi, the players try to connect cities (tiles) by their trade routes. These routes go through 5 types of land (tiles).
Before players can build trade routes, they must acquire knowledge about the trade in the different types of land. To get that knowledge (symbolized by corresponding coloured blocks) the players travel through Morisi.
A player can use his collected knowledge to build trade routes (symbolized by sticks in your colour).
By connecting cities by trade routes players get more power in these cities (symbolized by own-colour houses).
The goal is to get many houses in the biggest cities and to have houses in many different cities.

June 1999 I attended the Gottingen-meeting where at about 150 tables people show their new and less new games. It is a good opportunity to get attention for your new games or games in development. It also is an inspiring meeting to see so many games there and I took the opportunity to play many games.
The new ideas can be inspiring but my experience is that the inspiration mostly is caused by the things that are missing in games or the things I would like in an other way. After the Gottingen-weekend I had a strong feeling about the game I wanted to make. A clear combination of your actions on micro-level and the influence of your actions on the macro-level of the game, a combination of theme and player-actions which is visual and explainable in one sentence and an easy mechanism for planning far forward in the game combined with influences on your planning by the moves of your opponent(s) were the things I desired the most after the Gottingen-weekend.

So what I wanted to get in a game was more a feeling than a defined set of rules, but it only took a few weeks to find a set of rules to cause the right feeling. At that point an addiction to that game started. Then you feel contentment about making a game that fullfills your wishes but in fact the long traject of improving the game little by little then starts.

Besides inventing games which I myself like I also sell the games and the Essen-Spiel-fair was not far away. It became my third year with a booth in Essen so I already learned that the production of games is a combination of what you want and what you can and what the visitors of the fairs want. That's how the 200-copies-edition of Isi emerged.

In the paragraphs above you may recognize a way of attempting the development of new games. My thematical games are in most cases a combination of a theme on 'macro-economical' level and clear (and visual) micro-economical actions by the players (see also Ocean and Smart). My interest goes to combining the micro- and macro-level, in a way that players don't feel those two parts separated in the game.
That inductive and deductive approach to the theme combined in one game is the way I handle a theme and in my opinion also the way which attracts attention to games. At one side, you are strongly aware of what you are doing in the game (in Isi/Morisi you travel through the land, visit different types of land and build routes between the cities); at the other side, you see what the influences of your actions are on a bigger thematic level (the cities grow, symbolized by houses, and you see which cities develop to become the most important cities in the land, determined by favorable positions for cities in the landscape and by the actions of the players).

After the Essen-fair, the first tries of Morisi with hexagon-tiles and 2 or 3 or 4 players started. I had no expectations about that at all and made many new rules but during the experiments it became clear that it worked well without many changes. The game still has no luck and the victory still seems to be uncertain until the last moves in most sessions.
One important change is the use of own-colour houses. That makes the most difficult part of the game much more easy. The screens for the players are also an improvement in Morisi. Besides the rule-changes by the change from squares to hexagons and the change from the two-player-game Isi to the more-player-game Morisi, I added a new variation-rule: The cities have names in Morisi and the players can try to predict which cities become the biggest cities. You hold your predictions secret and you get points by good and half-good predictions at the end of the game.

More than three years ago I started to buy carton, paint, glue and more, made a game and a puzzle with that and hired a simple standplace at the saturday-market in Maastricht. The puzzle attracted the most attention and it sold quite a bit. Since then there was a progressive growth in the production. This year I started to make 1000-copies-editions, first started with the small abstract game Dutch Mountains. The larger editions make other ways of production possible. That's where a large part of my attention went to this year. Isi had an abstract outward. I hope players will like the new Morisi also for the artwork this time.